It is Becky’s voice screaming. I take off running behind Sean. I then hear Vandermill’s voice, and then Aileen’s, but I can’t make out the words. When I turn the corner, I find Sean standing next to Becky, both looking down into the cavern. “No! No! No!” She cries. “There is still another way.” I stop next to her. Tanya is on the ground. Vandermill is looking at the fire, his gun pointing in the air. Becky glances at me. I touch her forehead, and then mine.
She ignores me and yells, “No, Mom! No!”
And then I see what Vandermill is looking at. It’s a canvas bag, sitting on the fire. Suddenly things start kicking into place. I remember the bag of dynamite when Becky almost threw one at me. That’s what Becky saw Tanya doing. Dynamite!
I try to yell something but all that comes out is, “Ag!”
Vandermill must at the same time get the picture. He reaches to yank it off the fire. I grab Becky and she screams just as a flash of light and explosion throws me backwards into darkness and silence.
Chapter 75
Reba
It is a weird dream, or at least I think it is weird because I have a fuzzy dream memory of being run over by a tractor trailer loaded with rocks, in a thunderstorm, and then being carried to safety in the tusks of a great, white elephant. The elephant turns into a white light in my head until gradually I become aware that I have surroundings. The surroundings are not my bedroom. Did I fall asleep in the bath, in my clothes? I am soaking wet, but I’m lying outside, on the ground. There is something pointy, like a rock, underneath the center of my back. I shift my body a little and then open my eyes to a bright blue sky, much of which is suddenly blocked out by the huge head of a sabre-toothed cat.
A cry of fear catches in my throat. The cat dips his head and backs up a few paces. I sit up and discover that there are little pain points all over my body. I also discover that the big cat watching me is not alone. There are two more to my right. I look to my left and see Dad, and all the events of the last two days flood back into my memory.
Oh, God!
Dad is lying in several inches of mud. I crawl over to him, paying little mind to the cats. Somewhere deep down I know that I am alive because of them, and if Dad is alive, it is also because of them.
The bandage on his neck is attached only on one end, but there is little bleeding. His color is good and he is breathing. I take his wrist and after several failed attempts, manage to find his pulse. It seems okay.
“Dad.” There is no response. There is mud caked on one side of his face. I go to wipe it away but my hands are almost as bad. I brush his hair back. “Dad?”
I need water. We are on the bank of what used to be the pool, which was fed by the waterfall. The waterfall is gone. There isn’t even a trickle. All that is left of the pond, and the resulting creek, is a much smaller pond, the remnants of what didn’t flow away with the creek. There are rocks and mud between here and there. I take off my shirt—I’m wearing a t-shirt underneath—and use it to wipe some of the mud away. I then go to the water, slipping and sliding between the rocks, and get the shirt good and wet. I return to Dad and finish cleaning his face. Thoughts of Mom surface occasionally, but I push them back. There will be plenty of time to grieve later, I try to tell myself. Right now Dad needs me. It does no good. The tears come on even as I continue to clean Dad’s face.
On my second trip to rinse the shirt I see Sean. He is on the other side of the muddy creek bed; like Dad, lying unconscious; like us, being watched over by a sabre-toothed cat. I turn and look all around to find a total of six sabre-toothed cats.
They are all here except one.
I crouch down, rinse the shirt in the cold water and then stand. With the shirt dripping and running down my leg, I come to full understanding.
Oh . . . my . . . God!
Sam is dead.
Their leader is gone.
Now they are all looking at me.
Shit all to hell and back until the cows come home!
After a time when I’m certain there isn’t anything more I can do for Dad, I decide that I should go over and check on Sean, see if he’s actually alive. I stand and turn in his direction. He is sitting up, watching me. A funny thought comes into my head. He is looking at me in much the same way that the Smilodons are looking at me. He has also lost his leader.
Crazy.
And then another thought comes to me, this one deeply sad. Dad has lost his leader and when he awakes, he’ll be looking at me, too. Although these thoughts are funny—not ha-ha funny but weird funny—they bring me to the realization that I’m in control of this entire ball of wax. We are all that is left . . . except Matt! Where is he? Sam said she left him somewhere along the creek with a sabre-toothed guard. That’s where the seventh cat is.
And Nick. He may still be alive as well. Baldy is dead, and Black Beard may or may not be. I have to check on him. I look up at the hole in the side of the mountain that used to be hidden by the waterfall and wonder if the tunnel is still there. If it is, Black Beard may be okay. If it isn’t then he is buried in there.
There is a sound and movement at my feet. Dad is struggling to sit up.
Zach
“Dad!”
It’s Becky’s voice, but I can’t understand where in the hell I am. My useless arm is basically . . . useless. I try to sit up while attempting to ignore the sabre-toothed cat lying not thirty feet away. I remember being inside the mountain and fighting with Sammy and then getting hit alongside the head. Now I’m outside the mountain, soaking wet and hurting like hell not only from my arm, neck, and gash on my head, but from every muscle all the way down to my toes. If I didn’t know better I’d say I fell off the mountain.
All of a sudden Becky’s hands are on me. “Let me help you, Dad.”
I want to say I’m fine, but there is no possibility that words are going to make their way from my throat anytime soon. Also, I don’t think I am fine. If I fell off the mountain, something has to be broken.
With Becky’s help I get situated with my back against a log. “How do you feel?” she asks.
I try to take a deep breath but that hurts too much. I put my finger to my head, and then point to hers. Okay, fills my inner ear.
It hurts to breathe, I tell her. I may have a cracked rib or two.
She looks lost, like she does not know what to do, or doesn’t know what to say. “Do you remember what happened, Dad?”
I shake my head slowly and then realize I cannot hear the waterfall. I cannot hear anything except her voice. I look to see that the mountain is still there, but the waterfall is gone. All of a sudden the last words I remember hearing before I woke up comes to me. “It’s dynamite,” Becky had screamed. I don’t remember hearing the explosion, only seeing it and being thrown backwards. We were thrown out, weren’t we?
“Yes.”
We landed in the water.
“Yes.”
Your mother . . . Becky turns and sits down next to me. She says nothing. I take her hand and she lays her head on my shoulder.
Sean is standing on the other side of what used to be a creek. Now it is just mud, rocks, and pools of standing water. He starts coming toward us, limping severely and trying to pick his way around rock obstacles. Suddenly he stops, looking as though he is scared to approach. A movement at the left corner of my eye pulls my head. There is a cat on his feet, defensively aggressive it seems. I look to my right. There’s another. Becky jumps to her feet and faces each cat. They, reluctantly it seems, lie down.
Becky turns and beckons to Sean. “It’s okay now. You can come.”
Holy shit, I think.
“All the way to hell,” Becky adds.
I’d laugh if I could. Sean doesn’t seem convinced that he is safe from the cats. And then I wonder if he in fact is safe. A third one appears behind him. Is this their ploy as directed by their new leader; get his attention and then take him down from the rear? The cat growls and Sean whips around. He stumbles and falls, staggers to his feet and
then limp-runs across the creek, stopping ten feet in front of us, breathing hard. He looks back at the cat, who is now lying down, his herding-the-human mission completed.
“Fuck!” he says.
“It’s okay, Sean,” Becky says.
“Okay hell! They’ve got us corralled for dinner.”
“If they wanted us for dinner, we’d already be there. You may not believe this, but they saved your life. They saved all three of us, actually.”
He looks around at the cats, at the creek, and then at the hole in the side of the mountain. “I don’t understand. What happened?”
“Sit down,” Becky says.
“Tell me what happened, damn it!”
The cats to our sides come to their feet. “I said sit down,” Becky says with a firm, but calm voice.
Sean looks back and forth between the two cats and then slowly lowers himself to the ground. He looks at Becky with a tad bit of fear. The cats return to their prone positions.
“Thank you,” she says. “What happened is that the explosion blasted the three of us through that hole up there, through the waterfall that was there, and into the pool below. We would likely have drowned if not for these sabre-toothed cats coming to our rescue and dragging us out.”
“You’re kidding. There’s no way.”
“Sean, my mother just sacrificed her life to save us, and to take out one scourge of the earth, Victor Vandermill. I am not in a kidding mood.”
“Your mother?”
“She placed a bag full of dynamite on the fire after she thought that Dad and I were out of harm's way, and then waited for it to explode.”
Sean looks at me. I nod. “I’ll be a mother . . .” He closes his mouth and shifts his eyes back to Becky.
“It’s over, Sean. Your boss has no more control over you. As a matter-of-fact, you have no boss now. You can go back to Miranda.”
The look on his face changes from fear, to shock, and then to confusion as he apparently remembers the conversation after he killed Randall. “How do you know so much about my daughter?” he demands.
Becky turns her head to me. Should I tell him?
I don’t know.
Would he believe me?
Don’t see how he couldn’t if you tell him right. Don’t know what the advantage would be, though.
We may need him to get us out of here, or at least to help get Matt out if he is still alive.
I had forgotten about Matt. I nod.
Reba
“This may be hard to believe, so here it goes. Remember when I talked to you without using my mouth, in your mind?”
His mouth drops open. “I thought I had gone a little crazy. I didn’t . . .”
It was real, Sean. I am now in your mind, talking to you. If you want I can reach deep into your subconscious and find things you think you’ve forgotten about.
No way!
Yes, way. Now, let’s use words so that Dad isn’t cut out.
Sean says to Dad, “You know about this?”
Dad nods.
“It’s how we’ve been able to talk since the dog tried to kill him,” I say.
“Can you do this?” Sean asks.
Dad holds his thumb and index finger about a quarter inch apart.
“He can do it a little,” I say. “Nothing like what I can do.”
Sean seems settled finally. “What else can you do?”
“Nothing that you have a need to know . . . except I think I have to convince you of one thing. After that, we’ve got some things to do.”
He looks at me, waiting for what the one thing is.
“To show you that I have total control over these animals hanging around us, I am going to do a little demonstration.” Demonstration for sure, not only for him, but also for myself. This will tell me what kind of control I have. “I am going to tell the cat to my right,” Sean’s eyes dart over to her, “who is pregnant by the way, to stand up and come over and lick my hand. Then she is going to lie back down right next to me.” I wait until his eyes come back to me. “Okay?”
He nods.
I look straight into his eyes and then send the command to Nadia. I know all their names for some reason, as given to them by Sam, and I knew that Nadia was pregnant. Maybe Sam passed information to me when I wasn’t aware. It seems weird, but I’m learning that absolutely anything is possible. Nadia got her name from her grandmother, who was one of the originally created sabre-toothed cats back when Sans Sanssabre existed. She died about the time this Nadia was born. This will be Nadia’s first litter.
Nadia stands and walks over to me. I hold out my hand without taking my eyes from Sean. His eyes are on her. She licks my fingers, and then my entire arm. It’s like being brushed with coarse sandpaper. Down, I tell her. She settles. A shiver runs down my back.
“So, Sean,” I say as cool and calm as I can.
He drags his eyes from Nadia to me. He doesn’t have to say anything. He’ll now do anything I want.
“What about Nick?” I say. “Now that Vandermill is dead, do we have to worry about him?”
Sean looks back at Nadia, and then at me. “He got shot, so I don’t think so.”
“Shot! How?”
“When you two scuffled with Sammy and Lester, he got hit by a stray bullet.”
“Oh!” I, Reba Price, single handedly took out three of them. Wow! “Then I have a problem,” I say. “I needed him to help you get Matt out.”
“Matt?”
“He was shot in the gun battle with a couple of your buddies. He’s a ways down that way,” I point the direction of the creek flow, “and will need to be carried out. I don’t know if I have the strength to handle one half of a stretcher for that distance. Dad only has one arm.”
“To the helicopter?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be able to fly it, Mister Price?”
Dad looks at me. I hope so. Without an arm, I’m not entirely sure.
“He says ‘Yes,’” Becky says to him.
You have more confidence than I do, he says to me.
If it looks like you can’t, there should be a radio. We can call for help.
Sean carefully pushes himself to his feet, favoring his right leg considerably, and keeping an eye on the cats. “Then let's get going.”
By the time we get up to the helicopter, Dad looks exhausted, and Sean is hurting. We stopped early on while Sean and I searched down something that would work as a crutch. Sean thinks he has a busted knee cap. I don’t think so because he was walking on it a little at first. Maybe he has a torn ligament. I don’t know who is worse off now, Dad or him. I’m on my own if I’m going to get Matt out.
They both lay down on the ground while I go in for the stretcher. I was afraid that it would be one of those two-pole, canvas things. If I was going to bring Matt out by myself, I didn’t think that was going to work. This orange basket thing may just work, and it comes with blankets. I find a coil of rope in its original package and throw it out ahead of me, and then drag the stretcher out behind me. After strapping the rope down inside, I grab the end of the stretcher and say, “You guys stay here. I’ll bring Matt back.”
Sean tries to get to his feet. “You can’t do that by yourself.”
“Sit down,” I tell him. “I’m not going to be by myself. I have sabre-toothed cats as my work horses. We’ll drag him out. What you can do while I’m gone is check on your buddies. If Nick’s alive we need to help him. Same with Black Beard.”
“Black Beard?”
“Sorry. My name for him. Lester.”
“Why do you care?”
“I figure that they’re just like you; under Vandermill’s thumb for some reason. Now that he’s gone they’re free. The exception was Randall and Baldy . . . I mean Sammy. They worked for Vandermill out of some other loyalty and would have been revengeful.”
Sean gives me a very long look, then says, “You’re absolutely right.”
Becky!
What, Dad?
How do you know where he is?
Duh, Dad. Who do you think I have as escorts?
Oh, yeah.
I give him a kiss and then head off after the two cats, Yulya and Roma, already leading the way. I leave Tricia, who is getting too old, and Nadia to stay with Dad and Sean. The other two, Vadik and Gosha, have gone off hunting.
My going is slower than I expected since I’m having to pick places to go that won’t be too hard with the stretcher dragging behind me. I’m confused when they force me to cross a second muddy creek bed because I thought there was only one. I’m just about to get angry with them when I spot a cat lying under a tree. It is Edik. Matt must be nearby.
“Matt!” I call.
“Here.”
His voice is encouragingly strong. I find him propped up against the root ball of a downed tree. I drop down next to him and take his hand. “How are you doing?”
“Not too bad.”
I look at Sam’s bandage job on his knee and side. She used strips of a heavy cotton shirt. They are blood soaked but not dripping.
“It’s nice to see you,” he says. “I’m cold.”
“Nice to see you, too.” I pull one of the blankets out and drape it over him. “I’m going to rig the stretcher up to Roma to pull you out of here. You sit tight.”
“Okay,” he says softly.
I break the rope from its package and start thinking through how to attach it to the cat.
“Who is Roma?” Matt asks.
I pat the hind quarters of the sabre-toothed cat patiently standing still while I fiddle with the rope around him. “This is Roma.” I point to the one who was keeping him company. “That’s Edik. The other one is Yulya.” Yulya has wondered over to the enemy camp where I can now see two men lying dead.
Matt sits quietly for a while. I can tell from his thoughts, though foggy from pain and blood loss, that he is trying to sort out my relationship with the cats.
“Sam is dead,” I say. “Somehow, I don’t know how, she has passed the baton on to me.”
“Baton?”
“I am now their leader. All the sabre-toothed cats listen to me; take orders from me, just as they did before from Sam.”
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 86